6,360 research outputs found
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly
observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments
with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they
should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own
individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects:
some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting
cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this
heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We
have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as
a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else
beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous
Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity
aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of
people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with
cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and
cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour
makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think
malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more
Group size effect on cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas II. Curvilinear effect
In a world in which many pressing global issues require large scale
cooperation, understanding the group size effect on cooperative behavior is a
topic of central importance. Yet, the nature of this effect remains largely
unknown, with lab experiments insisting that it is either positive or negative
or null, and field experiments suggesting that it is instead curvilinear. Here
we shed light on this apparent contradiction by considering a novel class of
public goods games inspired to the realistic scenario in which the natural
output limits of the public good imply that the benefit of cooperation
increases fast for early contributions and then decelerates. We report on a
large lab experiment providing evidence that, in this case, group size has a
curvilinear effect on cooperation, according to which intermediate-size groups
cooperate more than smaller groups and more than larger groups. In doing so,
our findings help fill the gap between lab experiments and field experiments
and suggest concrete ways to promote large scale cooperation among people.Comment: Forthcoming in PLoS ON
Rehabilitation and social behavior: Experiments in prison
Despite the economic and social significance of crime reduction and criminals’ rehabilitation, research evaluating the effects of incarceration on behavior is surprisingly scarce. We conduct an experiment with 105 prison inmates and complement it with administrative data in order to explore several aspects of their social behavior. We first perform a comprehensive analysis of behavior in three economic games, finding evidence of discrimination against a sample from outside prison. In addition, our regression analysis reveals that inmates generally become less pro-social towards this out-group the longer they remain incarcerated. Finally, we introduce and evaluate a priming intervention that asks inmates to reflect on their time spent in prison. This intervention has a very sizeable and significant impact, increasing pro-sociality towards the out-group. Hence, a simple, low-cost intervention of this sort can have desirable effects in promoting rehabilitation and integration into social and economic life after release
Wiser World With Multiculturalism
A peer-reviewed book based on presentations at the XXIV Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2018, Guelph, Canada.
(c) 2020, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychologyhttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_proceedings/1008/thumbnail.jp
Group-Oriented Values, Rules and Cooperation
collectivism, cooperation, economic development, game theory, individualism, institutions, conflicts
- …